The research note, ‘Fifty Shades of Grades: Grade Compression at New Zealand Universities’, builds on the Initiative's August report, ‘Amazing Grades’, which identified a substantial rise in A grades as well as rising pass rates. This new analysis examines what has happened to all grades – not just As – revealing how the entire grading scale is shifting.
Drawing on official university records from 2006 to 2024, the analysis shows that A grades have expanded substantially while virtually every other grade has contracted. A grades temporarily overtook Bs during COVID-19 and are on track to do so permanently within the next few years.
“In August, we could show that A grades were rising,” said Dr James Kierstead, Research Fellow at the Initiative and author of the research note. “What we could not see then was what was happening across the entire grading scale. Now we know it is only A grades that are expanding. Bs and Cs are declining. That is classic grade compression.”
Key findings include:
“In August, we could show that A grades were rising,” said Dr James Kierstead, Research Fellow at the Initiative and author of the research note. “What we could not see then was what was happening across the entire grading scale. Now we know it is only A grades that are expanding. Bs and Cs are declining. That is classic grade compression.”
Key findings include:
- A grades have increased from 22% to 36% of all grades since 2006, a 64% rise
- B grades have fallen from 47% to 38%, while C grades have dropped from 20% to 17%
- New Zealand follows American trends, where A grades became the most common grade in the late 1990s, rather than the UK pattern, where the two top degree classes expanded together
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Dr James Kierstead is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington.This article was first published HERE
3 comments:
What do these grades mean in real terms?
There are shades of norm-referencing here. An 'A' to many people means 'head and shoulders above the rest'. You can hardly say that when an 'A' is becoming the most common grade.
Criterion-referencing means that an 'A' grader has mastered all or nearly all of the content delivered by a course. Now of course if we want to manipulate the proportion of 'A' grades upwards, all we have to do is water down the content so even a so-so student can master most of it.
Students take courses that they can score highly in - it's good for their GPA. Herein lies the real problem: a course that awards 'A' to 90% of its students has the same weighting with regard to the GPA as a course that awards an ''A' to only the top 10% of the student cohort because the academic standards set are so high. The lecturer offering a course with tough academic standards ends up with an empty classroom whereas the one offering soft-soap pseudointellectual crap ends up with a class bursting at the seams. This, in a nutshell, explains grade inflation.
When we come to highly skill-specific courses constituting training courses for professions such as surgery (or flying aeroplanes), a grading system just about loses its meaning. In the traditional grading system, a B+ is a jolly good grade but who wants to be sliced into by a B+ surgeon? I'm sure we would all rather see only the 'A' graders graduating from that course at all.
People at large seem to think they understand what academic grades signify, but they don't. For many to most university courses, a grade has meaning only to the student who receives it and the lecturer who awarded it; there is no comparability between course outcomes even within the same department or reference to a defined set of standards. It's a fantasyland in which the most deluded tend to appear to be the winners.
One can find grading scales, meanings, in university assessment handbooks, and many are on the web, public access. Google 'assessment handbook' and university name.
That's a start. But it doesn't provide the 'big picture' which is what we are on about here.
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